“I Want” Doesn’t Get — Just Recommending Data Archiving Isn’t Nearly as Effective as Requiring It « The Scholarly Kitchen

"We’ve known for a while that most research data eventually gets lost. To plug this slow leak (and stem the waste of of funding and effort it represents), some journals now ask that the data associated with a paper be archived at publication. There’s a whole host of different data archiving policies out there, but which are most effective? I was lead author on a recent study that looked at how often data got archived in journals with three different flavors of archiving policy. Our paper looked at four journals with no policy, four that recommended archiving the data in a public database but stopped short of requiring it, and four that had recently adopted a mandatory archiving policy. These latter four split into two groups, with two journals that required authors to have a 'data archiving statement' in every manuscript, and two that did not..."